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There's A Unique Thing About The Uk, Where You Give A Very Generous Foreign Aid Budget To Support Globally, Which Is Spent Wisely. We Partner With The Government Here To Make Sure That That Money Is Spent Well.

-Bill Gates

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There's A Unique Thing

Bill Gates

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There's A Unique Thing About The Uk, Where You Give A Very Generous Foreign Aid Budget To Support Globally, Which Is Spent Wisely. We Partner With The Government Here To Make Sure That That Money Is Spent Well.

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Programs Today Get Very Fat; The Enhancements Tend To Slow The Program Down Because People Put In Special Checks. When They Want To Add Some Feature, They’ll Just Stick In These Checks Without Thinking About How They Might Slow The Thing Down.

Playing Bridge Is A Pretty Old Fashioned Thing In A Way That I Really Like. I Was Watching My Daughter Ride Horses This Weekend And That Is Also A Bit Old Fashioned But Fun. I Do The Dishes Every Night - Other People Volunteer But I Like The Way I Do It.

Computers Are Great Because When You're Working With Them You Get Immediate Results That Let You Know If Your Program Works. It's Feedback You Don't Get From Many Other Things.

One Thing People Underestimate Is How Markets Don't Allow Anyone To Do Anything Except Make Better And Better Products. There's Not Much Leeway. The World Is A Lot More Competitive Than Most People Think, Particularly In A High-technology Area. If A Company Takes Its Eye Off Improving Its Products, If It Tries To Do Anything That Would Be Viewed As An Exercise Of Power, It'll Be Displaced Very Rapidly.

When I Was Growing Up, My Parents Were Almost Involved In Various Volunteer Things. My Dad Was Head Of Planned Parenthood. And It Was Very Controversial To Be Involved With That.

People Are Always Coming Up To Me And Saying, 'i Heard Your Dad's Speech, And It's Really Great.' And They'll Mention Some Place I Didn't Even Know My Dad Was Going To.

It's Hard To Improve Public Education - That's Clear.

Public Education

I Don't Think There's A... Boundary Between Digital Media And Print Media. Every Magazine Is Doing An Online Version.

Your Customers Get Better When You Do.

Service Culture

When I Was Young I Liked Taking Tests. I Happened To Be Good At It. Certain Subjects Came Easily, Like Math. All The Science Stuff. I Would Just Read The Textbooks In The First Few Days Of Class.

Training The Workforce Of Tomorrow With Today's High Schools Is Like Trying To Teach Kids About Today's Computers On A 50-year-old Mainframe.

I Didn't Completed My University Education

University Education

Rich Countries Can Afford To Overpay For Things.

Any Version Of Windows Is Going To Have Lots Of Great New Things That People Use And Things That Are Tough.

The Fight Against Aids In China Is Already Well Underway. The Chinese Government And Other Funders Are Providing Major Support, And They'll Continue To Bear Primary Responsibility For Delivering Prevention And Treatment.

[smart] Is An Elusive Concept. There's A Certain Sharpness, An Ability To Absorb New Facts. To Ask An Insightful Question. To Relate To Domains That May Not Seem Connected At First. A Certain Creativity That Allows People To Be Effective.

My Son Likes To Go See Mines And Electric Plants, Or The Large Hadron Collider, And We've Had A Chance To See A Lot Of Interesting Stuff.

Our Current Expectations For What Our Students Should Learn In School Were Set ﬁfty Years Ago To Meet The Needs Of An Economy Based On Manufacturing And Agriculture. We Now Have An Economy Based On Knowledge And Technology.

Contrary To Popular Belief, I Don't Spend A Whole Lot Of Time Following Soccer. But As I Have Traveled Around The World To Better Understand Global Development And Health, I've Learned That Soccer Is Truly Universal. No Matter Where I Go, That's What Kids Are Playing. That's What People Are Talking About.

I've Always Been Amazed By Da Vinci, Because He Worked Out Science On His Own. He Would Work By Drawing Things And Writing Down His Ideas. Of Course, He Designed All Sorts Of Flying Machines Way Before You Could Actually Build Something Like That.

We Are Always Saying To Ourself.. We Have To Innovate. We Got To Come Up With That Breakthrough... We're Only Paid For Breakthroughs.

Like Any Well Designed Software Product, Windows Is Designed, Developed And Tested As An Integrated Whole.

In Low-income Countries, The Main Problems You Have Is Infectious Diseases.

I Reboot [my Windows Pc] Every Night.

Polio's Pretty Special Because Once You Get An Eradication, You No Longer Have To Spend Money On It; It's Just There As A Gift For The Rest Of Time.

The Fact That There Was No Catastrophic Pandemic In Recent History Does Not Mean There Won't Be Another One. And We Are Certainly Not Prepared For The Next Pandemic.

I Realized About 10 Years Ago That My Wealth Has To Go Back To Society. A Fortune, The Size Of Which Is Hard To Imagine, Is Best Not Passed On To One's Children. It's Not Constructive For Them.

Me And My Dad Are The Biggest Promoters Of An Estate Tax In The Us. It's Not A Popular Position.

If We Think Long Term, The Younger Generation Here Is Better About Embracing The World. Not Seeing Countries Boundaries Kind Of An "us Versus Them" Thing.

We Should All Grow Our Own Food And Do Our Own Waste Processing, We Really Should.

Now Everyone Takes It For Granted That You Can Look Up Movie Reviews, Track Locations, And Order Stuff Online. I Wish There Was A Way We Could Take It Away From People For A Day So They Could Remember What It Was Like Without It.

When You Have A Product That Has Zero Sales, It Is Easy For People To Say Whatever They Want About It And Almost Fantasize About It.

Success Is A Miserable Teacher. It Tempts Intelligent People To Believe They Cannot Lose. And It Is An Unreliable Guide To The Future.

The General Idea Of The Rich Helping The Poor, I Think, Is Important. That Your Sense Of Justice Says, Why Should Rich Kids - Who Barely Get These Diseases And Almost Never Die Of Them - Why Should They Get The Vaccines, When Poor Kids, Who Actually Do Die From These Diseases, Don't Get Those Things? It's An Unbelievable Inequity That There Isn't That Access.

Success Is A Lousy Teacher. It Seduces Smart People Into Thinking They Can't Lose.

In The Long Run, Your Human Capital Is Your Main Base Of Competition. Your Leading Indicator Of Where You're Going To Be 20 Years From Now Is How Well You're Doing In Your Education System.

I Know There's A Farmer Out There Somewhere Who Never Wants A Pc And That's Fine With Me.

If You Believe That Every Life Has Equal Value, It’s Revolting To Learn That Some Lives Are Seen As Worth Saving And Others Are Not. We Said To Ourselves: “this Can’t Be True. But If It Is True, It Deserves To Be The Priority Of Our Giving.”

Does The Universe Exist Only For Me? It's Possible. If So, It's Sure Going Well For Me, I Must Admit.

Optimistic Life

The Chinese Are Clearly Inculcating The Idea That Science Is Exciting And Important, And That's Why They, As A Whole-they're Graduating Four Times As Many Engineers As We Are, And That's Just Happened Over The Last 20 Years.

This Social-networking Thing Takes You To Crazy Places.

Success On The Web Require High-level Corporate Understanding Of The Internet's Capabilities And Support Of Early Test-and-invest Projects.

The Moral Systems Of Religion, I Think, Are Super Important.

The Pc Has Improved The World In Just About Every Area You Can Think Of. Amazing Developments In Communications, Collaboration And Efficiencies. New Kinds Of Entertainment And Social Media. Access To Information And The Ability To Give A Voice People Who Would Never Have Been Heard.

In China When You're One In A Million, There Are 1300 People Just Like You

Today, We're Very Dependent On Cheap Energy. We Just Take It For Granted - All The Things You Have In The House, The Way Industry Works.

Aids Itself Is Subject To Incredible Stigma.

From The Day Microsoft Was Started, The Only Constraint To Our Growth Has Been Attracting Ah, More Great Programmers, Very Smart, Committed, Ah, People. And So We're Always On... On The Look For Ah, That Kind Of Person.

Helping Convene Global Stakeholders To Establish A Set Of Measurable, Actionable And Consensus-built Goals Focused On Extreme Poverty Is Invaluable.

Over Time, Yes, Countries Will Need To Look At Specific Gmo Products Like They Look At Drugs Today, Where They Don't Approve Them All. They Look Hard At The Safety And The Testing. And They Make Sure That The Benefits Far Outweigh Any Of The Downsides.

My Parents Are Very Successful, And I Went To The Nicest Private School In The Seattle Area. I Was Lucky. But I Never Had Any Trust Funds Of Any Kind, Though My Dad Did Pay My Tuition At Harvard, Which Was Quite Expensive.

As We Look Ahead Into The Next Century, Leaders Will Be Those Who Empower Others.

We Have To Find A Way To Make The Aspects Of Capitalism That Serve Wealthier People Serve Poorer People As Well.

Typically, Your Corporate E-mail Account Is Not, Today, That Spam-targeted. It's More The Free E-mail Accounts That Are Spam-targeted.

Most People Overestimate What They Can Do In One Year And Underestimate What They Can Do In Ten Years.

Today, We Take The Risk Of Nuclear War Quite Seriously, Climate Change Not So Much And Epidemics Least Of All. But No Single Country, Not Even The United States, Is Well Prepared. And Even If One Country Is Doing The Right Things To Protect Itself, It Has To Be A Global Thing.

By 2018, An Estimated 63 Percent Of All New U.s. Jobs Will Require Workers With An Education Beyond High School. For Our Young People To Get Those Jobs, They First Need To Graduate From High School Ready To Start A Postsecondary Education.

It's Fine To Celebrate Success But It Is More Important To Heed The Lessons Of Failure.

I Like To Read General Biology - Things About The Immune System And Advances In That Area - Because It Lays The Foundation For My Part Of The Dialogue At The Foundation About What Things We Ought To Pursue.

Five Years From Now On The Web For Free You’ll Be Able To Find The Best Lectures In The World. It Will Be Better Than Any Single University.

We Have Two Other Countries, Pakistan And Afghanistan - Again It's The Instability That Is A Problem There. So Over The Next Several Years, We Expect To Drive The Number Of [polio] Cases Back Down To Zero Because That Is Likely To Be The Second Disease After Smallpox That We Completely Eradicate.

Technology Is Unlocking The Innate Compassion We Have For Our Fellow Human Beings.

All Lives Have Equal Value. And So You Say, 'why Do Poor Children Die When Other Children Don't? Why Do Some People Have Enough Nutrition Or Reasonable Toilets And Other People Don't?' So Those Basic Needs That, Through Innovation, Actually It's Very Affordable To Bring Them...to Everyone.

We Can Make Market Forces Work Better For The Poor If We Can Develop A More Creative Capitalism-if We Can Stretch The Reach Of Market Forces So That More People Can Make A Profit, Or At Least Make A Living, Serving People Who Are Suffering From The Worst Inequities. ... You Have More Than We Had; You Must Start Sooner, And Carry On Longer.

Our Teachers Deserve Better Feedback.

Aids We're - Most Of These Diseases - We Are Down From The Peak. We're Down About 40 Per Cent From The Peak And If We Got The Right Vaccines, Which Are At The Early Stage Of Discovering, Then The Numbers Would Come Down Very Dramatically. So That's Why We Talk About It As An Emergency.

China Adopted A Capitalist System In The 1980s, And They Went From A 60% Poverty Rate To 10%.

We Believe The World Changes When The Boldest Thinking Is Directed At The Toughest Problems

We're Still Missing About A Dozen Vaccines That Will Make A Huge Difference. For Adults, We've Got Hiv And Tb Are Still Huge; For Kids Malaria Is Still Killing A Half Million Kids A Year Out Of That 6 Million. We Probably Need Some Vaccines, But We Need A Little More Data To Make Sure We're Getting The Vaccines That Will Save The Most Lives.

Who Decides What's In Windows? The Customers Who Buy It.

India Has Over 20 Percent Of The Kids Born In The World. And They Move Around A Lot.

Our Success Has Really Been Based On Partnerships From The Very Beginning.

When A Country Has The Skill And Self-confidence To Take Action Against Its Biggest Problems, It Makes Outsiders Eager To Be A Part Of It.

Self Confidence

Driving Up The Value Of The Advertising Is A Big Commitment For Microsoft.

I Don't Like Typing Messages On My Phone. Some People Get Used To It.

Innovation Is A Good Thing. The Human Condition - Put Aside Bioterrorism And A Few Footnotes - Is Improving Because Of Innovation.

Human Condition

China Is Certainly An Important Player In The Global Economy, And A Widespread Aids Epidemic Would Threaten That Growth.

If You Take From The Most Wealthy And Give To The Least Wealthy, It's Good. It Tries To Balance Out.

Customer Service Will Become The Primary Value Added Function Of Every Business.

People Always Fear Change. People Feared Electricity When It Was Invented, Didn't They?

There's Life And Death In Every Email.

I Really Do Think Cancer Will Largely Be A Solved Problem. I Think Most Of The Infectious Diseases Like Malaria - Our Foundation Is Very Involved - Once We're Finishing Polio Eradication, Then Starting Up This Malaria Eradication, And Getting That Done As Fast As We Can.

Globalization Has Made Copper And Other Minerals More Valuable, And Ghana And Kenya Have Recently Discovered Mineral Resources.

I Have An Excellent Memory, A Most Excellent Memory.

Computer Science … Jobs Should Be Way More Interesting Than Even Going To Wall Street Or Being A Lawyer--or, I Can Argue, Than Anything But Perhaps Biology, And There It's Just A Tie.

Over 80% Of The Poor Are People Who Have Small Plots Of Land And Grow Their Own Food And They Don't Grow Enough To Sell Much Into The Marketplace. So They Will Be Hit Hard By The Worst In Climate. They Really Get Hit Hard Starting In The 20-year Time Frame And Thereafter.

I'm Going To Retain A Lot Of Microsoft's Stock.

Well Private Money Can Take Risks In A Way That Government Money Often Isn't Willing To.

Since When Has The World Of Computer Software Design Been About What People Want? This Is A Simple Question Of Evolution. The Day Is Quickly Coming When Every Knee Will Bow Down To A Silicon Fist, And You Will All Beg Your Binary Gods For Mercy.

I Have Drifted Away From Thinking About These Philanthropic Things. And It Was Only As The Wealth Got Large Enough And Melinda And I Had Talked About The View That Wealth Wasn't Something That Would Be Good To Just Pass To The Children.

Depending On How Quickly You Get Ocean Rise, You Have People Who Live In River Deltas [at Risk].

Before You Were Born, Your Parents Weren't As Boring As They Are Now. They Got That Way From Paying Your Bills, Cleaning Your Clothes And Listening To You Talk About How Cool You Thought You Were. So Before You Save The Rain Forest From The Parasites Of Your Parent's Generation, Try Delousing The Closet In Your Own Room.

I Have Seen Firsthand That Agricultural Science Has Enormous Potential To Increase The Yields Of Small Farmers And Lift Them Out Of Hunger And Poverty.

Hunger And Poverty

Thanks To Quality Education, Israel Is One Of The Most Advanced Countries In The World .. Israel Is Advancing In High-tech Even More Than Other Developed Countries.

When You Have A Fortune That Is Almost Hard To Imagine, The Best Thing Is Not To Pass That On To One's Children. That Distorts Their Life Situation.

I Try To Make Time For Reading Each Night. In Addition To The Usual Newspapers And Magazines, I Make It A Priority To Read At Least One Newsweekly From Cover To Cover. If I Were To Read What Intrigues Me- Say, The Science And Business Sections - Then I Would Finish The Magazine The Same Person I Was When I Started. So I Read It All.

Nuclear Energy, In Terms Of An Overall Safety Record, Is Better Than Other Energy.

Microsoft Has Had Its Success By Doing Low-cost Products And Constantly Improving Those Products And We've Really Redefined The It Industry To Be Something That's About A Tool For Individuals.

If I Was Down To The Last Dollar Of My Marketing Budget I'd Spend It On Pr!

Software Is Different Than Other Products Um, Partly Because It's, It's Not Physical And, And Partly Because Of Its Complexity. You Can Express In Software Millions Of Different Cases And Making Sure That You Handle All Of Them Correctly Is Extremely Difficult.

By The Time We See That Climate Change Is Really Bad, Your Ability To Fix It Is Extremely Limited... The Carbon Gets Up There, But The Heating Effect Is Delayed. And Then The Effect Of That Heat On The Species And Ecosystem Is Delayed. That Means That Even When You Turn Virtuous, Things Are Actually Going To Get Worse For Quite A While.

The Phenomenal Generosity Of The United States In Its Aid Budget Towards Health Issues Is The Best In The World. You Can Look At That Broadly, You Can Look At It In Terms Of Hiv, The Pepfar Money Which Came Together In A Republican Administration With Bipartisan Support.

I Never Took A Day Off In My Twenties. Not One.

You May Have Heard Of Black Friday And Cyber Monday. There's Another Day You Might Want To Know About: Giving Tuesday. The Idea Is Pretty Straightforward. On The Tuesday After Thanksgiving, Shoppers Take A Break From Their Gift-buying And Donate What They Can To Charity.

The World At Large Is Less Inequitable Today Than At Any Time In History. Number Of People In Abject Poverty, As A Percentage, Is At All-time Low.

We Certainly See Opportunities In Vietnam For Talented People To Have Jobs In The It Sector, Including The Improvement Of The Efficiency Of The Economy And The Government.

I Want To Make Clear That We Respect The Role Of Government In Our Legal Andeconomic System.

Finding Information Is Either A Software Question Or A Question Of How Much Information Is Online.

In My 20s, I Worked Very, Very Hard. I Have A Much More Balanced Life Now.

The First Rule Of Any Technology Used In A Business Is That Automation Applied To An Efficient Operation Will Magnify The Efficiency. The Second Is That Automation Applied To An Inefficient Operation Will Magnify The Inefficiency.

The Willingness To Hear Hard Truth Is Vital Not Only For Ceos Of Big Corporations But Also For Anyone Who Loves The Truth. Sometimes The Truth Sounds Like Bad News, But It Is Just What We Need.

Bangladesh Is Largely A River Delta, And The Rising Sea Level Means That When Storms Come In, The Human Sanitation Is Backing Up, The Ability To Farm.

Part Of The Magic Of Economic Growth Is How You Educate People, And The Leading Economies Have To Stay In Front Of That. From An Economic Point Of View, It Affects Competitiveness And Creates Jobs. Or From A Social Justice Point Of View, You Can Take Someone In The Bottom Tier Of Income And Let Him Compete To Be A Doctor Or Lawyer. The Education System Is The Only Reason The Dream Of Equal Opportunity Has A Chance Of Being Delivered - And We're Not Running A Good Education System.

I Definitely Think Leaving Kids Massive Amounts Of Money Is Not A Favor To Them.

For Africa To Move Forward, You've Really Got To Get Rid Of Malaria.

We Got A Malaria Initiative, Really A Phenomenal Time, Even Though In The Early Stages There Was Some Uncertainty. Then Of Course [barack] Obama, Although He Had Budget Constraints, He Believed In These Things; A Lot Of New Initiatives, Including In Agriculture.

As I Look Forward, I'm Very Optimistic About The Things I See Ahead.

I Am Super Lucky. I've Been In The Area Where Things Have Been Changing And Been Part Of The Digital Revolution, The Magic Of Software, The Internet, The Computer, And Now The Cellphone... So It's Been A Great Privilege.

If Somebody Is Working On A New Medicine, Computer Science Helps Us Model Those Things. We Have A Whole Group Here In Seattle Called The Institute For Disease Modelling That Is A Mix Of Computer Science And Math-type People, And The Progress We're Making In Polio Or Plans For Malaria Or Really Driven By Their Deep Insights.

We Believe Unbelievable Progress Can Be Made, In Both Inventing New Vaccines And Making Sure They Get Out To All The Children Who Need Them.

Taxes Are An Investment In America.

In The U.s., We Believe The Best Way To Improve Lives Is To Improve Public Education.

I Am Not Topper In My University But All Toppers Are Working In My Microsoft Company.

People Don't Want Lots And Lots Of Single Purpose Devices. They Do Not Want To Have To Learn How To Set Up Something For Photos, Another Thing For Music, Another Thing For Video.

The Vision Is Really About Empowering Workers Giving Them All The Information About What’s Going On So They Can Do A Lot More Than They’ve Done In The Past.

People Care A Lot That The Usa Is Well Run, And People Globally Expect Us To Do Things In Upgrading Science And More.

I Think Ebola Is A Great Example Of Where The World Really Needs To Come Together. The Three Countries Where This Outbreak Took Place Have Had A Lot Of Civil War, Very Weak Health Systems. And So, It Did Take A While For People To Understand ....that Eventually What We Saw Was A Very Unique Ebola Epidemic. I Think It Is Quite Impressive What's Being Pulled Together, And I Think We Will Be Able To Get This Under Control.

Should There Be Cameras Everywhere In Outdoor Streets? My Personal View Is Having Cameras In Inner Cities Is A Very Good Thing. In The Case Of London, Petty Crime Has Gone Down. They Catch Terrorists Because Of It. And If Something Really Bad Happens, Most Of The Time You Can Figure Out Who Did It.

Robotics And Other Combinations Will Make The World Pretty Fantastic Compared With Today.

Well-spent Aid Money Is Saving Lives For A Few Thousand Dollars Per Life Saved.

If You're Using First-class Land For Biofuels, Then You're Competing With The Growing Of Food. And So You're Actually Spiking Food Prices By Moving Energy Production Into Agriculture.

A Fundamental New Rule For Business Is That The Internet Changes Everything.

If We [the Usa] Don't Innovate In Education, It's Literally Going To Mean Less People Get To Go Have That Education At A Time When More People Are Going To Want It. We've Got To Put Courses Out On The Web, We've Got To Put Interactive Learning Out On The Web.

50 Years From Now We Won't Need As Much Human Labour To Do What Manual Workers Do, So We Should Be Able To Take That Extra Productivity And Put It To Better Use.

Life Is Not A Continuous Process, There's Some Sort Of Finite Number Of Achievements That Defines Your Life.

I Regret Being The Richest Man In The World Because That Position Attracts Undeserved Publicity.

If You Think You're A Really Good Programmer... Read Knuth's Art Of Computer Programming... You Should Definitely Send Me A Resume If You Can Read The Whole Thing.

Learning To Write Programs Stretches Your Mind, And Helps You Think Better, Creates A Way Of Thinking About Things That I Think Is Helpful In All Domains.

People Should Just Buy A Cd And Rip It. You Are Legal Then.

The Leader Needs To Create An Environment In Which People Can Analyze The Situation And Develop A Good Response.

We Need To Look At Less Obvious Paths, Things Like The Wind In The Jet Stream, Which Is Very High Up. The Material Science Of What Type Of Kite String You Would Need To Connect Up To That. That's Still At The Basic Research Level.

Don’t Tax My Income, Tax My Consumption.

We Make The Future Sustainable When We Invest In The Poor, Not When We Insist On Their Suffering.

Outlook 2003 Did Create The Idea Of Search Folders And The Whole Longhorn Philosophy. You Can See It At Work In Search Folders, Where Instead Of Having To Drop Things Into Individual Folders, And Things Exist Only In One Folder, You Create These Search Folders And You Have The Criteria For The Search Folder.

I Believe Os/2 Is Destined To Be The Most Important Operating System, And Possibly Program, Of All Time.

Microsoft Was Founded With A Vision Of A Computer On Every Desk, And In Every Home. We've Never Wavered From That Vision.

We Need To Get A Broader Awareness. People Say Climate Change Is Really Bad, But Painting That Picture Of What You're Putting At Risk.

The Poor Can't Wait. Philanthropists Needed To Carry On Being Generous.

I Didn't Used To Wear A Watch. Now I Have A Spot Watch, Which I Wear All The Time.

We're Changing The World With Technology.

Changing The World

Software Was The Key Element That Would Determine How Useable And How Broadly Applicable The Machine Was.

I See Little Commercial Potential For The Internet For At Least Ten Years.

If You Were Born Poor, It's Not Your Fault. But If You Die Poor It Is.

Software Was Changing So Fast, So Unbelievable, That That Got Very Quick Adoption.

I've Said Some Stupid Things And Some Wrong Things, But Not That. No One Involved In Computers Would Ever Say That A Certain Amount Of Memory Is Enough For All Time.

I Believe Os/2 Is Destined To Be The Most Important Operating System, And Possibly Program, Of All Time. As The Successor To Dos, Which Has Over 10,000,000 Systems In Use, It Creates Incredible Opportunities For Everyone Involved With Pcs.

The Vision Is That People Should Have The Ultimate In Convenience. Being Able To Get The Things They Care About On The Appropriate Device.

We're All Responsible For Creating A Polio-free World While We Still Can.

I Do Normal Kind Of Contributions, Particularly For People Who Are Going Over To Africa And Help Highlighting Global Health, And That's Tended To Be Pretty Bipartisan In Nature Because Of The Coalition There Exists Fortunately Around These Global Health Issues. But I Don't Think My Backing, Putting A Lot Of Money Into Political Contributions Is A Way I'm Going To Try And Help Improve The World.

In Three Years, Every Product My Company Makes Will Be Obsolete. The Only Question Is Whether We Will Make Them Obsolete Or Somebody Else Will.

Flying Cars Are Not A Very Efficient Way To Move Things From One Point To Another.

I'm Sorry That We Have To Have A Washington Presence. We Thrived During Our First 16 Years Without Any Of This. I Never Made A Political Visit To Washington And We Had No People Here. It Wasn't On Our Radar Screen. We Were Just Making Great Software.

Banking Is Necessary - Banks Are Not.

Depending On How Quickly You Get Ocean Rise, You Have People Who Live In River Deltas [at Risk]. Bangladesh Is Largely A River Delta, And The Rising Sea Level Means That When Storms Come In, The Human Sanitation Is Backing Up, The Ability To Farm, It's Destructive-type Situations Like You Saw In New Orleans With Katrina. You're Increasing The Frequency Of That Stuff In Low-lying Areas Fairly Dramatically.

How We Deal With The Aids Epidemic Should Be One Of The Greatest Ways That The World Gets Measured. The Report Card For This Era.

And Knowledge Management Is A Means, Not An End.

Software Suppliers Are Trying To Make Their Software Packages More 'user-friendly'... Their Best Approach So Far Has Been To Take All The Old Brochures And Stamp The Words 'user-friendly' On The Cover.

I'm Invested In A Lot Of Battery Companies - And There's A Lot That Exists I'm Not In.

Today, The Issue Isn’t Quantity Of Food As Much As It Is Quality-whether Kids Are Getting Enough Protein And Other Nutrients To Fully Develop.

Your Most Unhappy Customers Are Your Greatest Source Of Learning.

There Are Websites That Any Government Wants To Block. The Truth About The Internet Is That It's Extremely Hard To Block Anything - Extremely Hard. You'll Never Get Perfect Blocking.

Whenever You Have War, You Often Have More Deaths Because The Medical System And The Food System Breaks Down, Than You Have Directly Through Violence.

If Gm Had Kept Up With Technology Like The Computer Industry Has, We Would All Be Driving $25 Cars That Got 1,000 Mpg.

The Nuclear Approach I'm Involved In Is Called A Traveling-wave Reactor, Which Uses Waste Uranium For Fuel. There's A Lot Of Things That Have To Go Right For That Dream To Come True - Many Decades Of Building Demo Plants, Proving The Economics Are Right. But If It Does, You Could Have Cheaper Energy With No Co2 Emissions.

Who Can Afford To Do Professional Work For Nothing? What Hobbyist Can Put Three Man-years Into Programming, Finding All Bugs, Documenting His Product, And Distributing It For Free?

There's 20 Companies That I Have Investments In - Some Batteries, Some Solar-thermal, One Big Nuclear Thing. We Need Hundreds And Hundreds Of Companies Like That, So That In A 20-year Time Frame We Really Are Starting To Change The Energy Infrastructure.

Nobody Has A Guaranteed Position In Computer Technologies Business. We've Done Some Good Work, But All Of These Products Become Obsolete So Fast And The Structure Of The Business As It Broadens Out Is Going To Be So Different.

There's No Magic Line Between An Application And An Operating System That Some Bureaucrat In Washington Should Draw.

We Will Never Make A 32-bit Operating System.

Operating Systems

Instead Of Buying Airplanes And Playing Around Like Some Of Our Competitors, We've Rolled Almost Everything Back To The Company.

Discrimination Has A Lot Of Layers That Make It Tough For Minorities To Get A Leg Up.

Good Stuff Tends To Happen Gradually, Whereas Violence Or Catastrophes Are Deemed More Newsworthy.

Philanthropy Is Fun And Fulfilling.

Microsoft Does Not Dominate The Software Industry By Any Stretch Of The Imagination. We Have Lots Of Very Able Competitors Who Keep Us Constantly Vigilant, And Sometimes They Beat Us To The Punch. Microsoft's Success To Date Is Based Solely On The Fact That People Like Microsoft Software.

Make It Just Like A Mac.

Some Very Poor Countries Run Great Vaccination Systems, And Some Richer Ones Run Terrible Programs.

Expectations Are A Form Of First-class Truth: If People Believe It, It's True.

We [us] Are The Biggest Per Person, By A Substantial Amount, Greenhouse Emitters, And We Give The Most Foreign Aid, Not Per Person But In Absolute. This Is Another Issue Where Hopefully We Will Take A Long-term Approach Which, Even Though We Sometimes Have A Hard Time Doing That, It's Easier For Us, As A Rich Country With This Kind Of Scientific Depth, Than It Is For The Poor Countries Who Will Suffer The Problems.

In American Math Classes, We Teach A Lot Of Concepts Poorly Over Many Years. In The Asian Systems They Teach You Very Few Concepts Very Well Over A Few Years.

When I Was Trying To Figure Out Why Lives Have Improved So Much In The Last 300 Years, Where We've Gone From A Third Of Kids Dying Before 5 To - By 1990 It Was Down To 10% - Now It's Down To 5%. And Saying Why, Over All History, There Were Smart People, But That Number Didn't Change. Average Life Span Didn't Change. What's Magical About What's Been Deemed The Industrial Revolution? It's Really Energy Intensity.

Leaders Need To Provide Strategy And Direction And To Give Employees Tools That Enable Them To Gather Information And Insight From Around The World. Leaders Shouldn't Try To Make Every Decision.

The World Won't Care About Your Self-esteem. The World Will Expect You To Accomplish Something Before You Feel Good About Yourself.

Anything You Do, You Better Enjoy It For Its Value. Because People Are Going To Second-guess Everything You Do.

At Microsoft There Are Lots Of Brilliant Ideas But The Image Is That They All Come From The Top - I'm Afraid That's Not Quite Right.

The Most Impactful Dollars That Australia Can Spend Are Actually What Goes To Help The Poorest.

If Your Culture Doesn't Like Geeks, You Are In Real Trouble.

Everything On The Internet Is Real God Damn It!

Even In Some Of Our Vaccine Areas, Like An Aids Vaccine, Things Have Taken Longer Than We Expected, But We Have The Pipeline Of Tools. The Biological Information That We Have That Gives Us Insights Is Fantastic.

We Have Completely Eradicated Smallpox; We Have Almost Eradicated Polio. That's The Miracle Of Vaccines, Which Is Even Greater Than That Of Antibiotics.

The Power Of Capitalism To Mediate The Gap Between Rich And Poor Is Pretty Incredible. Indeed, I Think, Year By Year, The Gap Gets Less.

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